Текст книги "2312"

Автор книги: Kim Stanley Robinson

Соавторы: Kim Stanley Robinson
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SWAN AND THE RINGS OF SATURN

Inspector Genette and his team had business to conduct in the Saturn system and would not be returning downsystem for a while, so Swan was free to join Wahram as he had requested. His manner had been very odd, his gaze fixed on her, x-raying right through her—toad vision, yes. It reminded her of the look he had given her when she told him she had eaten the Enceladan alien suite; out of the fog of that whole incident, the look on his face was what she recalled—his surprise that anyone could be such a fool. Well, he had better get used to it. She was not normal; not even human, but some kind of symbiote. Ever since eating the aliens she had never felt the same—assuming there had ever been any same to begin with. Maybe it had always been true that colors burst in her head, that her sense of spaciousness was sharp to the point of pain or joy, her sense of significance likewise. Possibly the Enceladan bugs made no more difference than any of the other bugs in her gut. She was not sure what she was.

The look on Wahram’s face seemed to suggest he felt much the same.

The visit with Wahram’s crèche on Iapetus was just a matter of dropping in on one of the ordinary meals in their communal kitchen. “These are some of my friends and family,” Wahram said when introducing Swan to the small group at a long table. Swan nodded as they chorused hello, and then Wahram walked her around the room and introduced her to people. “This is my wife Joyce; this is Robin. This is my husband Dana.”

Dana nodded once, in a way that reminded Swan of Wahram, and said, “Wahram is funny. I seem to recall that I was the wife when it came to us.”

“Oh no,” Wahram said. “I was the wife, I assure you.”

Dana smiled with a little squint of suppressed disagreement. “Maybe we both were. It was a long time ago. In any case, Miss Swan, welcome to Iapetus. We’re happy to be hosting such a famous designer. I hope you’ve enjoyed Saturn so far?”

“Yes, it’s been interesting,” Swan said. “And now Wahram is going to take me down into the rings.”

She followed them to the central dining table, and Wahram introduced her to some more people, whose names she forgot, and they waved or nodded without attempting to say more. After a while they chatted with her a bit, then went back to their conversations and left Wahram and his guest alone. Wahram’s cheeks sported little spots of red, but he seemed pleased too and was easy with his crèchemates as they drifted by on their way out. Maybe on Saturn, Swan thought, this was a rousing party.

Soon after that they took a shuttle to Prometheus, the inner shepherd moon of the F ring. The gravitational sweeps of Prometheus and Pandora, F’s outer shepherd moon, changed in relation to each other in ways that ended up braiding the F ring’s billions of ice chunks into complex streamers, very unlike the smooth sheets of the bigger rings. In effect the F ring was being swirled in the tides created by its two shepherd moons, making for some waves. And where there were waves, there were surfers.

Prometheus proved to be a potato moon, 120 kilometers long. Its biggest crater dimpled the end closest to the F ring and had been domed, and a station set just inside the rim.

Inside the dome a group of ring surfers greeted them and described the local wave, of which they were very proud. Prometheus reached its apoapse, meaning its farthest point away from Saturn, every 14.7 hours; each time it did so, it almost brushed the slowly tumbling wall of ice chunks that composed the inner border of the F ring. Prometheus was moving faster in its orbit than the ice chunks were in theirs, so it tugged a streamer of chunks out behind it as it passed, in a gravitational effect called Keplerian shear. The curving strand of tugged ice always appeared at a regular distance behind Prometheus, as predictable as the wake behind a boat. The wave at each apoapse appeared 3.2 degrees farther along than the previous one, so it was possible to calculate both when and where to drop in and catch it.

“One wave every fifteen hours?” Swan asked.

That was enough, the locals assured her, grinning crazily. She wouldn’t need more. The rides went on for hours.

“ Hours?” Swan said.

More crazy grins. Swan turned to Wahram, and as usual could not read his stone face.

“You’re going out too?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you done it before?”

“No.”

She laughed. “Good. Let’s do it.”

The rings could be modeled mathematically as a fluid, and from any distance they looked like a fluid, grooved by tight concentric waves. Up close one could see that the F ring, like the others, was made of ice chunks and ice dust, layered in ribbons that thickened and thinned in masses of individual bodies, all flying at almost the same speed. Gravity: here one saw its effects in a pure state, unobstructed by wind or solar radiation or anything else—just the sling of spinning Saturn and a few small competing tugs, all creating this particular pattern.

Prometheus was a perfect put-in spot for the surfers, and the ones going out with Swan and Wahram informed them they were both going to be launched into the wave with experienced veterans going before and after, to keep tabs and give help if needed. They offered tips for how to catch the wave, but Swan nodded agreeably and forgot their advice: surfing was surfing. You needed to catch the break at its own particular speed, and off you went.

Then they were all suited up and jetting out a lock. The white jumbled wall of the F ring was right there next to them; streamers of denser clusters of rubble were braided and kinked, but the entire mass was extremely flat—no more than about ten meters north to south relative to Saturn. Those ten meters were not the height of their wave but its width—which meant one could pop out of the ice at any point and be spotted and picked up if one was having any kind of trouble. Most of the waves Swan had ridden before were not like that, and she found it reassuring.

They jetted closer and closer to the white wall, until Swan could see discrete ice chunks very clearly, ranging in size from sand grains to suitcases, with the occasional chunk of ice furniture—desk, coffin—tumbling in the midst of things. Once she saw a temporary agglomeration about the size of a small house, but it was coming apart even as she spotted it. And now a white curl of banner was detaching from the wall and flowing down toward Saturn, which though bulking hugely below them was of no interest at all.

Swan tested her jets as she flew toward the wave, pressing with fingertips like a clarinet player, jinking forward in a little sashay of her own device. Suit jets were about the same everywhere. She focused on the approaching wave, which was lifting up and over her like Hiroshige’s wave; this one was ten kilometers high, and rising fast. She needed to turn and accelerate in the direction it was going, but not so quickly that she stayed ahead of it. This was the tricky part—

Then she was in the white stuff and being struck by the bits. She jetted a bit to keep her head out of stuff, as if bodysurfing out of a spume of broken salt water, but it was chunky stuff and she felt herself being thrust forward by little hits from little bits, rather than a mass of water. Then she was at speed with the wave, her head emerging from it so she could look around—very like bodysurfing, and she had to laugh, she had to shout: she was flying in a wave of ice ten kilometers high. She hooted at the sight, she couldn’t help it. The common band was raucous with the other surfers’ yelling.

The wave was really more a slice of a wave, only as wide as a room, and it sometimes felt only a bit thicker than she was—a two-dimensional wave, so to speak, so that it seemed one could get hit sideways, or jet at a slight tangent, and accidentally shoot out the side of it. So it would not do to submerge completely back into the white stuff, dolphin style. Maybe some of the other riders were doing it, but she felt she could get lost in there. Besides, she wanted to see!

She could feel the wave lifting her and casting her along. It was not only being struck by ice chunks, but also being tugged by gravity. The feel of the ice was like getting lightly pummeled by pebbles, which together were knocking her forward. Possibly one could ride a big surfboard on the push of this mass, direct the ride with one’s feet; indeed she saw down the wave someone standing on a thing like a coracle, riding in that very manner. But most of the others were bodysurfing like she was, perhaps because you needed a suit’s jets to make the best moves. In any case she had always preferred bodysurfing to surfing on boards. To be the object of flight, to cast yourself out into the spaces you breathed, and although motionless be flying at speed, slung forward—

The wave pitched and she was knocked forward faster than ever. Most of the chunks were between tennis balls and basketballs in size, and if she emerged on her jets until only her feet were in the mass, she could hop on bigger chunks and propel herself with little jumps forward and out. The wave was still surging up, but it was like the wake of a boat, in that there was no bottom to catch the submerged half of the wave and cause the upper part to curl and break. So from now on it would lose energy, and eventually dissipate without ever breaking. Too bad in a way, but now it was time to dance!

She jumped onto larger pieces when opportunities presented themselves, and with one jump after another got just where she wanted to be, on the border between the white flock of ice and the empty black space it was rushing into; and then she was dancing on white boulders, glissading on a kind of moving scree, as if running down a mountainside that had gone liquid. She laughed briefly as she got the hang of it. There was still a lot of hooting and hollering on the common band. The figure nearest her was possibly Wahram, hopping along with remarkable agility, like the dancing hippos in Fantasia. She laughed to see it. She could feel Prometheus tugging her along; this must be what a pelican felt like, surfing the air pushed up by a water wave. A gravity wave, throwing her through the universe. The howls of the other surfers sounded like wolves.

Back under the dome on Prometheus, out of their suits, Swan gave Wahram a sweaty hug. “Thank you for that!” she said. “I needed that! It reminded me that… it reminded me… Well. It was good.”

Wahram was red-faced, puffing with exertion. He nodded once, his mouth pursed in a solemn little knot.

“Well what did you think?” she cried. “Did you enjoy it?”

“It was interesting,” he said.

Lists (9)

Boosters to get off planets, Earth especially, need high thrust

Orbit-to-orbit interplanetary rockets need high exhaust velocity to save on fuel weights.

Deuterium-helium-3 fusion spheromak engine, built on Luna, use began in 2113;

Antimatter plasma core, magnetic bottle, Martian design, 2246;

Deuterium-tritium fusion, with lithium-blanketed core to create more tritium in the burn, Luna, 2056; two have lost thrust chamber integrity and exploded with loss of all hands;

Laser thermal, mainly used within the Jupiter and Saturn leagues for local transport, 2221;

Mass drivers for the terraria, 2090; often called the workhorse;

Inertial confinement fusion, Mars, 2237;

Micro-fission Orion format, subcritical pellets of curium-245 compressed to fission by Z-pinch, magnetic thrust to the pusher plate of the rocket, Callisto, 2271;

Orion style (external pulsed plasma propulsion), Luna, 2106

Magnetoplasmadynamic engine, propellant potassium seeded helium, Callisto, 2284;

Emergency propulsion system for disabled vessels, a “solar moth” where half of a balloon is silvered and sunlight is reflected onto a window chamber hoop boiler, where hydrogen seeded with alkali metals serves as the propellant. Tiny exhaust velocities and not powerful beyond Mars, but very compact until deployed, Mars, 2099;

Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma, which can “shift gears” from high thrust to high exhaust velocity, depending on need, Callisto, 2278;

advances in physics, materials science, and rocketry, plus a growing desire for improvements in speed and fuel efficiencies, now drive an industrial race for new designs, dominated by organizations on Luna, Mars, and Callisto, so we can expect to see

KIRAN AND LAKSHMI

The next time he was passing through the Cleopatra train station, Kiran called the number Swan had given him, and the call was picked up by Lakshmi herself. When he explained how he had gotten the number, she gave him directions to a noodle house near him and told him she would be there in an hour, and she was. She turned out to be a Venusian native in the classic mold—tall, dark, handsome, taciturn. Her combination of Chinese ancestry and Indian name resembled that of some others he had met; he had been given to understand it marked Venusians who wanted some separation from the old country, with the name being a way of saying they were more Venusian than Chinese.

“Don’t stop working for Shukra,” Lakshmi told him immediately, even though Shukra had left him in a state of xuanfu(drifting chaos). She would help him to get to cuo suo. (Both meant “place,” Kiran’s translation belt told him, but suowas one’s own place, meaning also his work unit.) She would give him a better assignment, which would involve serving as a courier in his travels, moving things and information from one xiaojinkuto another. Xiaojinku, small gold-storage centers: this sounded good to Kiran. He agreed to do it. Only then did Lakshmi tell him that he would be paid in yinxing gongzi, invisible wages. That didn’t sound as good, but something in the way she said it made him think it would be all right.

At the end of her description of his new job, Lakshmi stared at him. “Shukra got you from Swan Er Hong, but he did not use you. Does he think you are stupid? Or maybe Swan? Or me?”

Kiran almost said, Maybe Shukra is the stupid one, but Lakshmi did not actually seem to expect him to reply. She got up and left, and an hour later he had a new ID number, thus a whole new identity and name. None of which seemed to matter to anyone. His first assignment from Lakshmi was to courier a small packet from Cleopatra back to Colette; he was to fly back, to get there faster. With the packet, Lakshmi gave him a pair of translating glasses, which looked like thick old-fashioned black spectacles, with speakers in the earpieces. “Better translator,” she explained.

So he booked a flight, and in the process found that his new identity had quite a number of credits—so many it was a little scary. But interesting too, to see what kind of resources Lakshmi commanded. Maybe a whole xiaojinku, or more than one. People in his old work unit had said she was in the Working Group, and the Working Group ruled the planet.

Certainly her translator glasses were an upgrade; when he looked at Chinese language signs, with all their intricate ideograms, he now saw them overlaid in glowing red with the words rendered in English. It was startling to discover just how much information was written into the cityscape, now in glowing red: Beware of the Three Withouts. Vote for Stormy Chang. Towering Mountain Beer. The Door in the Middle of Half the Sky Alterations.A gender clinic, apparently. One could also Give Father a Second Sister.

Then he was off on a plane, then up above the turbulent clouds, into the permanent night under Venus’s sunshield. Only starlight illuminated the cloudtops below. Being in a jet reminded him of Earth. Out the window Earth itself made for a bluish double star overhead, with Earth twice as bright as Luna, the two together jewel-like and a little bit heart-stopping. Then the clouds below cleared, and he could see broken chopped jumbled ridges—the Maxwell Montes, apparently. They formed a giant mountain range, Venus’s Himalayas.

In Colette he gave Lakshmi’s packet to a person who approached him at his lodge entrance, and two days later the same person came by and asked him to take another packet to Cleopatra, on another flight.

Back in Cleopatra Kiran went up to the promenade running around the crater circumference just inside the dome, as instructed. Snow flowed down the outside of the dome in a perpetual avalanche. The packet was to be taken to point 328 on the dial of 360 degrees that divided the rim promenade. He found that the rail on the promenade was numbered as if in an arena concourse. The person waiting for him at 328, a small of indeterminate gender, spoke in Chinese. “We are the night runners of Bengal, very important work,” Kiran’s glasses translated out loud, causing a smile from the speaker, who apparently understood English; the glasses must have said something funny, but Kiran didn’t know what it was. “Tell me more about that,” he said quickly, and the small led him to a nearby bar.

Kexue (Science) sat on the bar’s edge while Kiran sat on a stool, and for a couple of hours Kiran listened to stories muttered in his ear by his glasses, stories that made little sense to him but were interesting anyway. They were part of a project, Lakshmi was a goddess, Science had once kissed her foot and almost electrocuted humble self; one could not touch the gods, but only obey. When they parted, Kiran got Kexue’s number and a promise to get together again.

His run back to Colette, with another packet, was to be on the ground this time, in a dedicated rover. He found he was only honorary pilot at best of this squat rover with six wheels, as it ran by AI. It was pretty fast, humming over a road of crushed rock and hard-packed gravel and passing enormous mining trucks with deft lane changes. The cab of the rover tilted backward, it seemed from the weight in the freight compartment behind. The freight had not been identified for him, but there was a dosimeter clicking steadily away on the dash. Uranium, maybe? The packet Kexue had given him was not sealed, and he checked in it, hoping this action would not be detectable, and saw that he was carrying a number of handwritten notes. Their Chinese letters scrawled like drunken calligraphy and were surrounded by little sketch drawings of birds and animals. His glasses overlaid the letters with red words:

Only he who has eyes can see.

In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.

Seemed like codes to him. Whether the messages were personal or official, important or routine, he could not know. At one point his glasses had translated Kexue as saying that to circumvent both Shukra and the qubes, Lakshmi was being forced to keep to just a word in the ear. Maybe these notes were part of that. Things were very, very unclear at the top, Kexue had said.

“Like in China?” Kiran had asked.

“No,” Kexue had said. “Not like China.”

Back in Colette, Kiran gave the packet to the same person outside his lodge door, then rejoined his work unit and spent a few weeks back on the ice, then got another call from Lakshmi and went to Cleopatra to get another packet. That happened quite a few times, with nothing in particular to distinguish each instance. As Kiran continued to live with his work unit in Colette and perform work associated with Shukra, he supposed he might have accidentally become some kind of mole or double agent, but he couldn’t be sure. He would have to call on Swan for his defense if anyone got annoyed. One day he found out by accident, when pushing his translation glasses back up on his nose, that they would translate with the red words floating on the lenses from spoken Chinese as well as written ideograms. This was a great discovery, and helped him both to learn faster and to stay in the game while he did learn. Red writing plastered over the visible world—it could be disconcerting, but it was so nice to have things explained at last. He kept it on more than off.

So, message packets and the occasional radioactive rover were couriered by him back and forth over the Spine of Ishtar. Looking at the map, Kiran saw that the giant high plateau that dominated the western half of Ishtar (and would that be the Shoulders of Ishtar or the Butt of Ishtar?) was named Lakshmi Planum. He didn’t know if this was a coincidence or an allusion. He had to wear a personal dosimeter, and the millisieverts clicked on up. It was lucky that the longevity treatments had good mutation repair therapies!

He made many drives alone, and the AIs on board the squat rovers were simple indeed. The translator glasses were turning out to be much like a dog, attentive but predictable. He had never liked dogs, but in the struggle to understand his situation, he had to like this one.

In Cleopatra, after his meetings with Kexue, he would go out in search of the loudest bars he could find. Down one alley he heard English being sung, an entire group singing “The Ballad of John Reed,” and he almost ran down the street to make sure they would not somehow disappear. But it turned out to be just a song bar, with lots of bad beer and bad jokes and only a few people who spoke English. He met a woman there nevertheless, Zaofan (Rise in Rebellion), and went with her back to her room, and when they resurfaced from their dive into sex, back to the world of speech, and began to talk in the darkness before the city dome’s artificial dawn, she mentioned that she too worked for Lakshmi. Kiran felt a quick pulse of fear—it seemed more than a coincidence. He asked her some questions, very cautiously, and after a while her stories made it seem like half the people in Cleopatra worked for Lakshmi, so possibly their meeting had been a coincidence after all. Which would be nice; he didn’t want to be involved in any plots he didn’t understand. On the other hand, he did want to be involved in plots that he did understand. That would represent progress. So he began to hang out at the song bar, and between his spectacles and the people there who spoke some English, and once or twice some Telugu, he talked to a lot of people. He would sit between a Uighur and a Vietnamese and they would be using English to communicate with each other, their English mangled to the point of poetry, but comprehensible. He would bless the British and American empires and soak in every phrase.

He stuck by his friend Zaofan when he could find her, and from her and her unit found out more about Lakshmi. Lakshmi was one of the Working Group, everyone agreed. She didn’t like Shukra; she didn’t like China. In fact no one knew of anything she liked. There were rumors that in Indian mythology, Lakshmi was an avatar of Kali the death goddess—or maybe it was vice versa—no one knew for sure. Their Lakshmi was said to be hermaphroditic, and went through lovers like a black widow. You did not want to have her attention fixed on you. She had lived all over Venus in her youth, and some said ran a Beijing protection racket during her sabbaticals, under the nom de guerre Zhandhou (Do Battle). Shukra was in big trouble—“He’ll be sanwubefore it’s all over, you’ll see. Or maybe even fourwithouts, if she castrates him too!”

Apparently Lakshmi had wanted to eject Venus’s frozen carbon dioxide at an angle into space, a process that over time would have speeded up Venus’s rotation and made for a natural day. That plan had been turned down in favor of the big sequestration, but as she was such a power in the Working Group, there was always the possibility that the policy might someday change. Who knew? The Working Group was a tight secretive little club, prone to fits of enthusiasm and sudden faction. Most of the people in the song bar felt it was a dangerous force, not at all interested in ordinary Venusians except insofar as they were useful to the terraforming. In other words, same old China! China 2.0! Chinaworld! The Middle Kingdom Relocated Closer to Sun! Therefore the Inner Kingdom! They had a lot of names for it.

Some in the bar said all this was an exaggeration and a cliché. Here they were in the song bar, after all, and out there doing great things every day, therefore part of the story of Venus, no matter what people said about government—but much laughter and shouted scorn greeted these sentiments. Obviously most in the bar felt they were only helpless observers of a giant drama going on above their heads, a drama that was eventually going to suck them down into its maelstrom, no matter what they said or wanted. Better therefore to drink and talk and sing and dance until they were stupid with exhaustion and ready for a stagger through the early-morning streets, Kiran following Zaofan to her slot on the matrazenlagerof her work unit. After a few repetitions of this Kiran was accepted as part of her work unit’s lodge, which was nice.

One time he was coming back into Colette when it seemed to him that someone was watching him, and when he noticed this, the person began to close on him. A big man, and his quick glance revealed to Kiran the existence of another person behind Kiran. Immediately Kiran bolted into one of the jammed alleyways and jinked through the back of an open-front shop, causing an uproar that he hoped would delay the people following him. After that it was a matter of dashing as hard as he could, deeper and deeper into the maze of circular alleys that made up Colette’s downtown. Zigzagging often, he hurried to Lakshmi’s little Colette office and drew himself up before the security person at the front desk with aplomb. “Here to see Lakshmi,” he huffed. The security person’s eyebrows shot up his forehead and instantly there was a gun pointing at Kiran’s face.

It took a while for Lakshmi to get over to Colette, and in that time the guards didn’t want him to leave the office. It was pretty much like being under arrest, but when Lakshmi arrived, she seemed pleased with his escape.

“There’s a closed building under the rim at 123 in Cleopatra,” she said when he was done with his story. “Move to Cleopatra, stay with your friend there, and just float for a while. See if you can figure out how many people go in and out of that building per day. I think Shukra’s trying to set up a xiaojinkuin my town.”

“Does that work like a hawala?” Kiran asked.

Lakshmi did not acknowledge that he had spoken. She left and then Kiran was free to go.

So the next time he was in Cleopatra, Kiran floated. He went across the city into the 110 district, where the radial boulevards were less frequent and the buildings often industrial in size and purpose. The bars were correspondingly bigger as well. He went into one near the 123 facility and sat near the slot where the bartender gave drinks to the waiters. He turned on his translation glasses and stared forward like he was watching something on them, slurping bad beer and reading the translation of the voices around him.

They’re too beautiful, it’s a mistake.

Lakshmi wanted them that way.

Shhh! She who must not be named!

But Kiran could hear them laughing. The glasses did not print out in red Ha Ha Ha!as in a comic book; he wished they would.

After an evening of listening to bar patrons he stood around for a while in the street, took a cable car up to the rim promenade, and walked above the neighborhood in question, looking down casually. He had his spectacles record the conversations going on around him. Later that night, back down near the city center, he sat in a corner table of a bar and played verbal translations of what he had recorded, hoping he had caught some security people talking. “She has to stop this, it’s too much.” But another one was not happy to hear this: “We work for Big Pears, just do it.”

Kiran kept replaying the spectacles’ recordings and translations, trying to get the hang of the Chinese tones as well as ponder the sense of the scraps of talk. There was “a man from Shanghai,” it seemed. Nánrén husheng.This seemed to be a man of importance. Shanghai was inundated, he thought. Maybe it was another code phrase. There was a song in the song bar: “My home was in Shanghai—now it’s underwater—I came to Venus because I did not want to live with the fishes—but now here I am, and it’s wetter than the bottom of the sea—and full of sharks! Goodness gracious!”

The word “they,” tamen, seemed to refer to the Working Group, or some other powerful force behind the scenes. “They” want this, “they” will do that. The Working Group was definitely opaque from below. It was either elected or appointed; no one knew which. There were supposedly about fifty people in it. Some people said it was like the tongs back home, others that they had found their method in the pre-Han ways, or even from the lost Iroquois League of North America.

Zaofan and her unit were full of more stories, told in snatches when out in the streets. Lakshmi was working with others, including Vishnu (naturally), also a Rama and a Krishna. Taking an Indian name was compared to cutting off your queue during the Qing dynasty. So if the people doing this were inthe Working Group, what did that say about Venus-China relations? No one was quite sure.

Vishnu and Rama appeared only at meetings held at the Cleopatra spaceport, so possibly they came from off-planet or were traveling a lot. Krishna lived on Venus, but in Nabuzana, a canyon city on Aphrodite. Once Kiran was called into Lakshmi’s room when Krishna was visiting her, or so Zaofan told him later when he described the visitor, who had not been introduced or said a word.

Shukra’s new building at Cleopatra 123 (if that was what it was) was tightly secured, with a small population living in it full-time, judging by food shipments in and recycling shipments out. Kiran spent a fair amount of time in the neighborhood, wandering around watching the place, sometimes from the rim promenade. Lakshmi’s people also had several closed buildings in Cleopatra, Kiran was learning, so perhaps she felt that Shukra was horning in on her territory by doing the same.

Then one day he went back to Zaofan’s lodge in Cleopatra and found their section of the matrazenlagerwas occupied by an entirely different group of people. Zaofan was gone, Strength of Nation, Great Leap—all the little group that had taken him in. The lodge manager said they had left together after getting a call from somewhere on Aphrodite. The manager shrugged. This was the way on Venus, the shrug said. People got their working orders and moved as a unit. If you weren’t part of the unit, it wasn’t any of your affair; you were xuan, left hanging.